I’m Still Alive…

In case any of the seven readers of this blog were A) still readers of this blog, and B) wondering if I was still alive, the answer to B) is: Yes.

Life has been extra-hectic.

We moved Mom in with us last October. This involved a drastic pairing down of her own existence so that it would fit into one room in our small house. It also involved an only-somewhat-less-drastic pairing down of the existence of myself, my wife, and our daughter so that Mom would have a room to fit into. So after clearing all the crud out of her four bedroom house that she was occupying all by herself and moving all of our crud out of what used to be our office (and remodeling the bathroom and pouring a new driveway/slab in the backyard for a storage shed) she’s all moved in. Of course, that left the cleaning and prepping of her old house for sale. In the meantime, Mom went through a hip-replacement in December and is juuuuust about back to where she was before the operation, albeit with much less pain. The house is now in escrow (for quite a bit less than our original asking price), and soon the entire process will be over and done with. “Old Normal” will be gone, and “New Normal” will be complete and here to stay.

Yep. That’s a lot of stress.

And the rest of my family is well, too. My wonderful wife turns 40 in April, and as part of her 40th birthday present, I took her to Hawaii for a week. We spent four days on Kauai and three on The Big Island, and we had a fantastic time! It was a HUGE letoff of all the stress we’d built up over the previous eight months. The pictures can be found here. Hope you enjoy them!

Work is virtually unchanged, for now. Slightly more experienced in-type (I flew a bit over 850 hours last year). And I’m slightly more advanced in terms of longevity, I suppose. The economy has kept the actual seniority advancement to a minimum, but that’s completely beyond my control. There’s a merger on the horizon, and I’m not certain how that will work out. I’m optimistic that, in the long run, there’ll be a lot of money made by the combined companies, and that will mean a modicum of career security.

Other than that, I’m pretty much the same guy I was last time I posted. Though, I did hit my weight-loss goal of 220 lbs (115 lost) back in September of last year. So far, I’ve managed to keep active enough to keep it off, mostly (had a bit of a setback from the Hawaii trip; dark-chocolate-covered macadamia nuts by the bag-full didn’t help). I’m running a lot, lately, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can run six to eight miles without stopping or falling over dead. I guess falling over dead would count as stopping…